Our world has been thrown into chaos by the COVID-19 pandemic, as lives are being lost, hospitals become overwhelmed and surging demand causes household items like toilet paper and cleaning supplies to sell out.

For businesses which need to maintain operations during this time of crisis, adapting your material planning and supply chain systems to this ever-changing environment is a monumental challenge.

Deep Analysis Leads to Mass Updates

I recall an example from about 10 years ago, when a natural disaster halfway around the world severely impacted a small but critical supplier to the business I was working for at the time. We needed to adjust lead times on specific components, based on information that wasn’t present in our ERP system, because it was only relevant to our supplier’s ability to manufacture them. Nonetheless, we had hundreds of specific items that required close management.

Within Infor M3, there is limited ability to perform mass updates using the CRS800 program, but in situations like these, your supply chain experts are likely to work with spreadsheets in Excel at the item level, and want to adjust planning parameters based on their analysis. Suppliers may advise them that certain categories of goods are still available, while the lead time on others needs to be extended, for example.

Excel + M3 APIs to the Rescue!

That’s where M3 APIs come into play. I’ve written previously about calling M3 APIs from Excel spreadsheets, and that technique of performing mass updates comes in handy during times like these. Using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), you can create routines that take each line of a spreadsheet and perform an API update in M3 just as if a user was manually keying in the information, respecting all the business logic and security that you have configured.

In this way, you can combine the expertise of your supply chain analysts with the power of M3 to update and communicate your integrated material plan internally and externally. Given the changing nature of this crisis from week to week, those analyses and plans will require multiple major updates along the way.

So take a look at my introduction to calling M3 APIs from within Excel, and if you need assistance with getting started, feel free to ask me for help. These tools can be developed against most functions in M3, but if there isn’t an API available for your specific situation, there are more arcane options available. But we’ll save that for another post…

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